For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine.
Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google’s search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The same year, Apple’s iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google.
Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple’s search ambitions.
Google’s anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business.
Organizations:
Google, Apple, The New York Times, Big Tech